Dragon Universe Wiki:Manual of Style
This is the Dragon Universe Wiki's Manual of Style, please do not do any reorganization and cleanup of wikitext on the wiki unless you are fixing things to follow this style guideline. Article Layout Sourcing Writing style * Articles should be written in US English, not British English. * Articles for permanently deceased characters should be written in past-tense. * Articles should be written in an in-universe style, this includes calling characters by what they were called at this point in the story, and not refer to the reader or viewer when talking about events. * Articles should be independent of any point in the series, it should not be required that pages be updated every time a new event happens in the timeline simply because articles were written from the perspective of someone reading on the latest chapter. ** If you use the word "current" anywhere in a phrase to refer to something, you likely wrote it the wrong way. Similarly, if "current" is used in an article, it was likely written wrongly and should be fixed. * Walls of text in articles should be avoided where possible. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read and are more concise for readers of the wiki. Articles containing walls of text should be fixed to ensure readability. Infoboxes * Character Infoboxes… ** …should only list Manga and Anime techniques, except in the cases of Movie-only characters, or in the case that the movie is canon. ** …unless on a non-canon subpage, should not contain game-only techniques. * Technique Infoboxes… ** …can contain Game-only and Movie-only users, so long as the (Game/Movie-only) tags are applied. Naming Conventions Article titles * Character articles should be titled simply with the character's name and should not include their title. For example: "Cold", not "King Cold". * The character's official name should always be the title of the article. For example, while Coola is known as "Cooler" in the English anime, the article should be named "Coola" and "Cooler" should serve as a redirect. ** The same goes for chapter, movie, game, and OVA titles. The literal translation of the Japanese should be the title and the English name should serve as a redirect. * Character articles should be titled with the name in the Western order. For example: Tokunoshin Ōmori rather than "Ōmori Tokunoshin". ** The exception to this is Son Goku and his family. Chapter/Episode Numbering * Since Dragon Ball was originally run as one continuous manga, we treat each chapter as a continuation of the last, even if it takes place in the Z portion. * Episodes should be numbered by the original Japanese number. * Kai, since it is shorter, will have an episode page for each of its own episodes. Daizenshuu v. Literal Translations * Wherever possible, literal translations should be preferred. These are the most accurate translations and the proper names. * However, if the Daizenshuu provides its own English translation, as is the case with Daizenshuu 4, then these names are to be used over the literal translations. That is because these translations are the official Japanese names. Canon WikiText style * Things like capsule and capsule are needless, only capsule should be used. ** This also applies to links written to denote a plural: don't write the link as capsules; instead use capsules. :::Note: This does not apply with "Dragon Ball" and "Dragon Balls," due to both redirecting to different articles. * Don't bypass redirects using things like Goku make use of the redirect properly with Goku. * Do not use level 5 headings in articles, as they cannot be edited without editing the previous heading and can't be distinguished as a heading at all. * When using galleries, include hideaddbutton=true in the parameters of : this prevents Image policy violations by the addition of bad images. Common improper style changes * Do not change "Coola" to "Cooler", "Coola" is the correct name. * Do not change "Freeza" to "Frieza" or "Freezer", "Freeza" is the correct name. * Do not change "Shenron" to "Shenlong" or "Shen Long"; Shenron is Japanese, while Shenlong is Chinese. * Do not go adding last names to links unless you have a valid reason to do so (full character name hasn't been used earlier in the article). Full names should not be abused to bypass redirects. * Do not change page numbers in ref tags to have a leading zero. Going around the wiki and changing 3 to 03 despite most pages sticking to 3 doesn't improve the wiki at all and just adds needless edits, just stick with 3. * Do not make edits that do absolutely nothing to change the appearance of the page when it is rendered, such as adding or removing a space between paragraphs, adding underscores in spaces when including an image onto an article, or removing unused parameters from infobox templates. This does nothing except add needless edit revisions to the page history and does not improve the wiki. * Do not replace words just because you don't know or understand their meaning. Such edits will be considered disruptive. See Also * Image policy